Sorokin, Vladimir - Day of the Oprichnik

The count no longer wails; he’s wheezing, tossing and turning in the water. He looks like a sea mine.

“There’s ‘everything will be returned’ for you.” Batya grins, taking a glass from the tray and sipping it.

A convulsion passes through the count’s body, and he stiffens forever. Life and fate.

“Upstairs with him.” Batya nods to the bath attendants. “Change the water.”

The attendants drag Urusov’s corpse out of the pool, take the gold cross and the famous hedgehog ring off him, and give them to Batya. Batya tosses what remains of the powerful count in his hand.

“There you have it: here and gone!”

They take out the corpse. Batya gives the gold cross to Svirid:

“Give this to our church tomorrow.”

He puts the hedgehog ring on his pinkie.

“We’ve had our steam bath. Upstairs! Everyone—upstairs!”

The grandfather clock strikes 02:30. We’re sitting in the tiled drawing room. After midnight Batya has kept only five of us: Potyka, Vosk, Baldokhai, Yerokha, and me. After the wet stuff our Batya had a hankering for coke with vodka. We sit at a round table of red granite. There’s a dish with stripes of white, candles, and a carafe of vodka. Yerokha warms the dish with the candle, drying the coke from below. Batya’s already loaded, and when he’s really loaded, he likes to give us lofty lectures. Our dear Batya has three speeches: one about His Majesty, one about his deceased mama, and one about the Christian faith. Today it’s faith:

“Now you, my dear Enochs, you’re wondering, why was the Wall built, why are we fenced off, why did we burn our foreign passports, why are there different classes, why were intelligent machines changed to Cyrillic? To increase profits? To maintain order? For entertainment? For home and hearth? To create the big and beautiful? For fancy houses? For Moroccan leather boots, so everyone could tap their heels and clap? For all that’s good, true, and well made, so that there’d be plenty all around? To make the state as mighty as a pole from the heavenly tamarind tree? So that it supports the heavenly vault and the stars, goddamnit, so the stars and moon would shine, you sniveling scarecrow wolves, so that the warm wind would blow-not-stop-blowing on your asses, is that it? So your asses would stay nice and warm in your velvet pants? So your heads would feel cozy under their sable hats? So you sniveling wolves wouldn’t live by lies? So you’d run in herds, fast, straight, close together, most holy, obedient, so you’d harvest the grain on time, feed your brother, love your wives and children, is that it?”

Batya pauses, inhales a good snort of white coke and washes it down with vodka. We do the same thing.

“Now you see, my dearest Enochs, that’s not what it was for. It was so the Christian faith would be preserved like a chaste treasure, you get it? For only we, the Orthodox, have preserved the church as Christ’s body on earth, a single church, sacred, conciliar, apostolic, and infallible, isn’t that right? After the Second Nicene Council we are the only ones who glorify the Lord correctly, for we are Russian Orthodox, because no one took the right to glorify the Lord correctly away from us, did they? We didn’t retreat from the community of our church, from sacred icons, from the Mother of God, from the faith of the fathers, from the life-giving Trinity, from the Holy Spirit, from the life-giving Lord who comes from the Father, who venerates the Father and Son and speaks the prophet, right? We have rejected everything sacrilegious: Manichaeanism, and Monotheletism, and Monophysitism, right? For whomsoever the church is not mother, God is not the father, right? For God by His nature is beyond understanding, right? For all true-believing Orthodox priests are heirs of Peter, right? For there is no purgatory, only hell and heaven, right? For man is born mortal and therefore he sins, right? For God is the light, right? For our Savior became human so that you and I, sniveling wolves, could become gods, right? That’s why His Majesty built this magnificent Wall, in order to cut us off from stench and unbelievers, from the damned cyberpunks, from sodomites, Catholics, melancholiacs, from Buddhists, sadists, Satanists, and Marxists; from megamasturbators, fascists, pluralists, and atheists! For faith, you sniveling wolves, isn’t a change purse! It’s no brocaded caftan! No oak club! What is faith? Faith, my noisy ones—is a well of springwater, pure, clear, quiet, modest, powerful, and plentiful! You get it? Or should I repeat it to you?”

“We got it, Batya,” we always answer.

“Well, then, if you got it—thank the Lord.”

Batya crosses himself. We cross ourselves as well. We snort some more. Wash it down. Groan.

And suddenly Yerokha’s nostrils sniffle with hurt.

“What is it?” Batya turns to him.

“Forgive me, Batya, if I say something that might cross you.”

“Well?”

“I’m offended.”

“What offends you, Brother Yerokha?”

“That you put the noble’s ring on your finger.”

Yerokha is talking sense. Batya squints at him. Then he says loudly:

“Trofim!”

Batya’s servant appears:

“What do you desire, sir?”

“An axe!”

“Yes, sir.”

We sit, looking at one another. And Batya takes a look at us and suppresses a smile. Trofim comes back with the axe. Batya takes the ring off his finger, and places it on the granite table:

“Go ahead!”

Faithful Trofim understands immediately: he picks up the axe and smashes the ring. Splinters of diamond fly.

“There you go!” Batya laughs.

We laugh as well. That’s our Batya. That’s what we love him for, why we cherish him, and remain faithful to him. He blows the diamond dust off the table:

“So what are your mouths hanging open for? Go on and cut it!”

Potyka takes care of the coke , cuts the lines. I wanted to ask why the youngsters were involved with the count but we elders were in the dark. We weren’t needed? Lost our trustworthiness? But I hold back: better not to ask in the heat of the moment. I’ll get to Batya from below by and by…

And suddenly Baldokhai says:

“Batya, who wrote that pasquinade?”

“Filka the Rhymester.”

“Who’s that?”

“A talented guy. He’s going to be working for us…” Batya leans over and sucks a white strip through his bone tube. “He wrote a great one about His Majesty. Want to hear it? Hey, Trofim, call him.”

Trofim dials the number, and a sleepy, scared face in glasses appears not far away.

“Taking a nap?” Batya says, drinking from a shot glass.

“No, no, Boris Borisovich…” the rhymester mutters.

“Come on, then, read us the poem to His Majesty.”

The fellow straightens his glasses, clears his throat, and recites with feeling:

In our time, far distant and remote,

Behind the stone wall of the ancients,

Lives not a man, but Creation:

An act, a deed, as great as earth’s own globe.

Fate has given him his lot,

Which does precede the very void.

He is what all the boldest dream of,

Though none before has dared or thought.

But he remains a human being,

And should he come across a winter wolf,

He’ll shoot, and his shot, too, will echo in the woods,

As surely as it does for you and me.

Batya pounds his fist on the table:

“Well? Son of a bitch! See how cleverly he wrapped it up, huh?”

We agree:

“Clever.”

“All right, go back to sleep, Filka!” Batya says, turning him off.

Suddenly Batya begins singing in a deep bass:

The hour of grief, the hour of parting

I want to share, with you my friend.